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Mar. 9, 2021
Who doesn’t want a home with a view of the sea? Well, unless the waves are washing around your living room.
Flooding is an intensifying problem in some parts as climate change bites down, and not only on low-lying coasts. But the coasts are a good place to start worrying because a rising sea level can no longer be prevented. The amount of carbon dioxide we have already added to the atmosphere makes more temperature increases inevitable, based on historical climate patterns, and rising temperatures in turn make a further rise in sea levels unavoidable.
The only question is how much the average sea level will rise by any given point in time. We don’t know exactly, in part due to unknowns about global energy policy and how warm the world will get this century.